Details in the Fabric
by WriterInTheMaking101
Summary: When you lose someone you love, how do you move forward when their life came to such an abrupt stop? The Fitzgerald family deals with the loss of Anna.


Sarah

Today, we cleaned out her room, or the half of the room that used to belong to her, and is now, by all accounts, entirely Kate's. It was one of those things you thought might have to do before she left for college, when the credits stopped rolling and she drove off into the sunset, Jimmy Choo shoes tucked under the backseat and maybe an old Polaroid picture of us shoved hastily into her wallet, just so she didn't forget our faces and where she had come from.

But Anna wasn't going to college or university. She wasn't getting married, not moving away from home, nor was she leaving her life with us in order to begin a new life, somewhere else, with a different set of characters, diferent setting and a new plot. She wasn't even going to graduate from middle school, for god's sakes.

There wasn't a particular **reason** for Anna leaving, she simply did. She died, and there is never a good rhyme nor reason for death, especially when it involves your thirteen year old daughter.

It is impossible to fathom the way Anna's life had stopped when everything in her room would indicate the exact opposite; there was a balled up Kleenex in the garbage can, a People magazine open on her bed to some trashy article about divorce and weight gain in Hollywood, a Sudoku puzzle half filled in, because Anna could never sit down and fill out the entire thing.

I had always pictured this moment for us, for her, because Anna was the one you pictured things for; she wasn't the one that had been dying of leukemia since the age of two, nor was she constantly one step away from becoming a juvenile delinquent. When it came to Kate, we took each day one step at a time, and when it came to Jesse, we cringed and simply avoided the subject of his future all together. Anna was supposed to be the one with the bright cheery future, the atypical middle child that was content and well rounded. Anna was not supposed to be the one that was killed in a car crash, not the one that was left on life support, a vegetable, eyes closed, brain shut off.

I'd run it through my head a hundred different ways; it would be bittersweet and we would laugh and cry and maybe play a cheesy song, a song Anna loved when she was little. We'd look at the kindergarten photos, box up her art work and stories, stash them in the attic until she was old enough to realize how precious these things were. We would fold up the dress she wore when she was a flower girl a couple years ago and we'd package her porcelain dolls in bubble wrap, remembering the way she used to sit patiently and have tea parties with them, dressing them up and brushing their hair for hours on end.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. I had always thought, when Kate got diagnosed, that maybe that was it for us, maybe our bad luck was over. It made sense after all; your baby girl gets leukemia, but everything else somehow works out okay, your bills get paid on time, your TV, washing machine and car don't break down at the absolute worst of times and you never burn the stove and half the kitchen while making Alphagetti. It's the universe's way of saying, 'sorry everything is so screwed up for you, we'll try to compensate by making these little things work out.' I guess my brain should have been sent a warning signal after everything started happening with Jesse. WARNING, the world is going to find even **more** ways to fuck you over! Good luck surviving!

I see these people on Dr Phil, couples that are considering getting a divorce because the wife bites her nails while they're watching CSI, and it just drives the husband around the bend that she can't sit still and watch as Grissom digs up clues and discovers dead bodies. I smile in a bitter kind of way at these trivial sort of things; Dr Phil sits with them, pats them on the knee and says, "Don't worry. We're going to **help **you." I wonder if he knew this was in the contract when he signed up; petty, ridiculous people that don't know how lucky they, that constantly need _something _to fight about.

I hold a dress in my arms, and it reminds me strongly of a deflated body; it's a light shade of pink and strapless. Anna had picked it out herself a few months ago, because I told her it wasn't right to not own a single dress, and besids, you never knew when something might come up. I never realized this 'something' was going to be defined as being killed in a car accident, wiping Anna of all the little things that make her who she accident took away her smile and the constant life in her eyes, the way she was so gentle with everything, and yet not scared to stand her own ground.

This is the dress Anna is going to wear at her funeral, tomorrow ("_Come on sweetie, put the dress on, we're going to be late") "But Moom, I don't WANT to go,"), _and it's so wrong, all of this; pink is too bright for a funeral, and you're not supposed to be picking out your daughter's dress for the date that she's buried, as though it's a special occasion, something that merits the bringing out of such a dress.

"But Mommy," Kate's voice rings in my ear (she only calls me Mommy when things are bad, when things hurt, when she's in trouble, when Anna died), "Anna wouldn't want this to be sad. She'd want to wear the dress, and she'd want.. she'd want to stand out as something nice in a sea of sadness."

And so I stand up, fold the dress in my arms and place it on the end of Anna's bed. I bring a shaking hand to my lips, kiss my fingertips and then drag them along the bedspread, and I remember her playing Barbies to the backdrop of this ladybug comforter, hosting tea parties and spilling juice on the floor, and trying to clean it up with mounds of paper towels.

"This isn't fair," I say to no one in particular. "Not. Fucking. Fair."

Kate

One time, when I was maybe seven or so, and Anna was around four, we decided we were going to run away. It was a Saturday and Mom was grocery shopping and Dad was taking a nap, and Jesse was supposed to be watching us, but he was out biking with a bunch of his friends.

We were lying on our stomachs, on the floor, planning it in an elaborate manner, in the way way that only two little kids can. "So," I said, scracthing a mosqutio bite on my back, "you're gonna go and get the cookies, and then I guess we should probably bring Momma's cell phone, in case I get sick or something, and then the colouring books." I paused. "Anything else?"

Anna shrugged; she was four, she did whatever I said, whenever I said it. She followed me around the house copying the way I laughed, the way I skipped into the kitchen and shoved my hand into the cookie jar. It used to annoy the hell out of me, and now I'd give anything to have her back.

And so we dug out the Cinderella suitcase that Mom had given me two Christmases ago and then filled it with as many Barbies, Oreos and crayons that we could find. As an afterthought, I stuck in a handful of Vitamin C and Mom's cell phone, and we left, walking down the sidewalk purposefully, as though we knew exactly where we were going, and what we were going to do when we got there.

"Kaaaaate?" Anna bleafted after a little while.

"Hm?"

"Do you think we should be home for supper? Mommy's making steak"

I shrugged. "I guess we'll go home for supper. Everyone's gonna miss us so much. I bet we'll win medals when we come home, 'cause they'll all be so happy."

Anna smiled hopefully. "Yeah! A MEDAL!" she cried, and visions of standing on a soap box, wearing the symbol of honor around our necks while people in suits snapped our pictures, danced through our heads and we smiled, and kept walking, because what could be better than that?

And then just as soon as it all started, the excitement of the whole thing disappeared from us, in the same way the sun disappeared from the sky suddenly to be replaced by that biting cold that signaled surely it was soon time for fall. "Kate?" Anna's voice was little and uncertain.

"It's okay, baby," I said, in the way I'd heard Mom say so many times before. "We'll just.. we'll go down this street and keep goin' till we get home."

I don't remember how long it took before curious heads began to peek out of front doors, curtains opening ever so slightly, but when you're the kid with cancer, everyone knows who you are and seems to think it's their duty to make sure you're returned home safely, all in one piece, as though by doing so they can protect you from the disease eating away at you; but soon enough we were being sheparded by various people, into the pools of light offered up by the street lamps. We were being fed cookies and water and people were patting our heads, and then Mom came.

"Oh god," she said, as we hurled ourselves into our arms, "I was so worried about you."

"Kate was brave," Anna smiled, "she wasn't scared or nothin'."

I didn't tell her that I was terrified, that I was positive someone was going to kidnap us, or that an elephant was going to get loose from the zoo and trample us, or that we'd get swallowed into a big pothole, or whatever other million illogical things kids worry about. I never did tell her, and I don't know why, but it's been bothering me lately.

I almost tell Jennifer about it, the shrink that my mom's making us all go see, but I don't, because it's something private and personal, and after all that's happened I feel like we deserve a few things for only us to know; untold secrets and memories, making cookies in the kitchen on New Year's eve and watching her watch me with this intense look on her face, getting up at five thirty one morning and trying to make pancakes together before passing out and watching Little Mermaid together. This is one thing I'm not willing to give up just yet, especially to a woman that never knew Anna.

"Kate?" Jennifer probes me, and I realize I've been sitting in silence for almost five minutes; she probably thinks this is a sign that I'm mentally disturbed and planning in detail my suicide, because for everything I do, Jennifer has an explanation for it.

"Yes?"

"Kate.. you haven't talked about Anna very much since the accident, have you?"

"There's no such things as accidents," I say, out of habit, because it's something I've believed since I was four and was able to understand that the way I was sick wasn't the way Jesse was sick when he had a cold. I was sick the way the bald, skinny, pale kids on TV were sick and once you understand that you're going to die you can't think of it as a simple accident as someone else's silly oversight.

"What do you mean by that?" Jennifer asks.

"Spilling a glass of juice is an accident, or falling off the monkey bars is an accident. Your sister going brain dead? That's no accident."

"You feel responsible for the death of your sister," Jennifer says, point blank. Aren't you supposed to tell therapists what you feel, instead of the other way around?

I shrug. "It's always someone's fault."

"That's not true. Kate.. when you were diagnosed with leukemia, it was nobody's fault. Right?"

"God." I say, although I am not, and have never been overly religious who the hell else can you blame? "Or whoever decides that sort of things."

"Did you ever think.." Jennifer searches for the right word and folds her hands over her kneecaps. She reminds me of my mom in this moment, the way she used to be before things started to weigh her down. "Did you ever think that sometimes things just happen, and that nobody is responsible for them?"

"I don't know." I just want out of here, badly, I just need to breathe. "It's like a Harry Potter/Voldemort scenario," I say, and I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's the only thing I can think of to compare it to; Anna used to sit with me and read me the books, and I pretended I thought it was a really nerdy thing to do, but I loved it. She had the best reading voice, soft and soothing.

Jennifer doesn't say anything, so I do; "Neither can live while the other survives?"

She nods. "I know. I've read them."

"I think it had to be one or the other. My parents made Anna so she could save me and maybe.. maybe she did. Maybe she did what she had to do here, and maybe I was going to get better and so she died. But I was supposed to die. I was diagnosed when I was two, by anyone's standards I should have been dead fourteen years ago."

"But you're not," she says gently. "You're not dead."

"You don't understand," I say, and I feel like one of those ridiculous girls on a bad after school special, that scream and sob about how nobody understands them. "People were prepared for me to die.. Jennifer, I'd been planning my own fucking funeral since I was nine. Do you understand that? Anna was thirteen, she was young and she'd.. I mean she'd never even properly kissed someone. It should have been me."

This, as it turns out, will be the chorus for the rest of all our lives, the background noise to everything we ever do: _shouldabeenme,shouldabeenme, nother, nother, mememe. _


End file.
